


Breathe

by fathomlessspite



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Series Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-20
Updated: 2011-05-20
Packaged: 2017-10-19 15:33:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/202403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomlessspite/pseuds/fathomlessspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Finale fic - It's almost 2 years later and Steve is standing on Danny's doorstep.</p><p>"His chest is tight and his vision a little foggy and he wonders if he’s finally having that stress induced heart attack he had threatened Steve with so many times."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> beta by imaginarycircus :)

It’s been months and months since Danny left Hawaii. And sometimes he can convince himself that it’s been almost as long since he’s stopped thinking about Steve McGarrett once a day; but right now, with Steve standing on his doorstep in New Jersey he doesn’t think he can convince himself of that.

His chest is tight and his vision a little foggy and he wonders if he’s finally having that stress induced heart attack he had threatened Steve with so many times, when he realises he isn’t breathing. Once he has taken several deep breaths and his vision has cleared, Steve is still standing in front of him.

Steve opens his mouth and closes it again. Danny rolls his eyes.

“You gonna’ stand there all day or come in?” Danny grunts out and steps back in to the house. He turns his back on Steve and starts down the hallway.

He hears footfalls following him inside and the snick of the front door closing. A soft thud, which he assumes is the duffle bag Steve had over his shoulder, being dropped to the hallway floor.

It’s a little surreal to have Steve in his home. Actually he thinks it would probably be odd to see Steve anywhere other than Hawaii. But having Steve in Danny’s house in New Jersey is a bit like bumping in to your doctor at the theatre, or your old high school teacher on holiday. Two worlds colliding, which you never even contemplated would.

At the same time having Steve in his space again leaves Danny with the familiar ambiguous state of being both relaxed and on edge.

Danny leads the way into the living room, but doesn’t look round. He leans down and picks up Jack from the play pen, where Danny had hastily placed him when the doorbell rang, and balances him on his hip.

When he turns round Steve is staring from him to Jack and back again with wide eyes, “That’s-”

“A child Steve, yes. You want a beer or something?” he asks and wanders toward the kitchen.

“Sure,” Steve croaks. Danny takes pity on him. It’s also a nice distraction because he’s not sure he’s quite ready to start yelling at Steve yet. He needs a few more minutes of calm before the inevitable storm.

“Rachel was pregnant when everything-- When she left Hawaii,” he explains as he pulls two beers out of the fridge and begins looking for the bottle opener. He’d learned the hard way not to use the kitchen counter top after he had chipped it one time and forever suffered Rachel’s wrath.

“I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, well. I didn’t really have time to tell you, did I? It seemed like it could wait until we got you out. And then when we finally did you were gone so-”

“Danny,” Steve begins and Danny cannot take that tone of voice. That tone that says below the suppression of all his human emotions, deep, deep down Steve has been torturing himself for almost two years over all this crap.

“What are you doing here, Steve?” Danny asks, suddenly tired as he hands over Steve’s beer and takes a small sip of his own. Jack tries to make a grab at the bottle but ends up with a fistful of Danny’s shirt instead as Danny moves the bottles just out of reach.

Steve stares down at the bottle in his hands before looking back up, eyes clear and determined, like he knows exactly what he is going to say and he is going to get it out if it kills him, or Danny.

“I was in DC, I was in DC and I saw Kaye,” he says.

“Oh yeah?”

“She uh, she told me that you guys kept at it after I-”

“Ran away?” Danny interrupts.

“Yeah, after I left. That you got the evidence to lock him up.”

“That we did, all by ourselves. Imagine that,” he replies, bouncing Jack on his hip a little and moving toward the dining table. They’ll probably need to be sitting down for this, no need in wasting all that energy standing that they will need for this discussion.

“I didn’t know,” Steve said as he drops into a chair opposite Danny.

“What? You didn’t-?”

“I didn’t know, I haven’t been in contact with anyone who knew so I only just found out,” he explains. Danny stares at him for a moment. They’d gone to all that trouble to put Wo Fat away, for Laura Hills, for Kaye’s fiancé, for Steve’s parents and he didn’t even know. Well fuck.

“So you’re here to what?”

“I just wanted to-”

“You’re here to say thank you? Seriously? Two years after you turn tail and fucking run away you turn up here just to-”

It is only when Jack starts screaming that Danny realizes he had been well on his way to shouting. Cursing inwardly he gets up and takes Jack back into the other room and settles him, it takes a few minutes which is good because he thinks if he went back in there straight away he might just take Steve’s head off.

When he finally walks back into the kitchen Steve’s got his head in his hands and Danny’s anger fades for a moment. The uncharacteristic display of emotion leaches away Danny’s own. And if he’s honest he was never as angry as he had behaved, hurt maybe. But he knew there had to be a reason Steve bolted; he pulls out the chair next to Steve and sits down hoping he’ll finally find out what happened.

“We tried to get a message to you, obviously it was never passed on,” Danny says quietly.

“I was pretty off the grid,” Steve answers looking up.

“Course you were,” Danny huffs, a little humourless laugh. “You’re all in one piece though, looks like? Two arms, two legs, ten fingers, can’t see the toes obviously...”

“I’m good,” he answers. Danny takes in the stiff set of Steve’s shoulders and the new lines round his eyes and thinks that might be a bit of an exaggeration.

He wonders if Steve had stayed, and Danny had figured out something with Rachel. If everything hadn’t gone to hell, then maybe those lines around Steve’s eyes might be attributed to laughter. Maybe Steve might genuinely be able to say he’s good, and maybe Danny might have been a part of that.

“That’s good,” is all he says.

“So,” Steve says after a minute. “Everything worked out for you and Rachel then?”

Danny laughs again, “Not so much.” Steve looks at him in confusion after a glance toward the living room where they can hear Jack laughing happily to himself. “Well there’s Jack obviously, and Grace and we’re living here together. But we’re not together.”

He doesn’t know why he is explaining this to Steve, if his friends and family don’t get it then his emotionally stunted former boss is unlikely to. Still...

“We figured out we’re better off as friends. Anything else tends to be too much pressure and we kinda implode.”

“But you’re living together?”

“Yeah, I got the loft, the kids are on the second floor, Rach is on the first and all other shared amenities on the ground,” he says gesturing around them.

“I don’t get it,” Steve says.

“You’re not alone. It works for us, for now. It might not work forever, but as long as it means I can live with my kids and see them every day, I’m gonna’ try to make it work.”

Steve smiles at him, not quite the goofy smile of times past, but close to it.

“What?”

“It’s nice; some things’ll never change, huh?”

“Family’s important Steve, you don’t just give up on them.” Steve might be emotionally backward, but he isn’t completely oblivious, he clearly realises Danny is talking about him.

“Danny, I’m so sorry. You don’t even know-”

“No I don’t, I don’t understand why you just up and left us, Steve.”

Steve sighs, “I’d screwed everything up, hadn’t I? Kono had been arrested, Five-0 disbanded, you were all under investigation and then Kaye told me you were supposed to be in New Jersey with Rachel and Grace and I-- Well I’d screwed that up for you too.”

“So you ran away and left us to it?” Danny shouts, finally losing his temper. “After all the crap we’d had to deal you decided ‘hey I know how to make it all better, I’ll run away and leave them to clean up the mess without me!’”

“Danny-”

“Don’t you ‘Danny’ me! Screw you, Steve. That is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard.” Danny runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know why I even let you inside my house,” he adds. Steve flinches at that.

“Yeah,” Steve chokes out in agreement.

“Then why did you even bother coming here?”

Steve looks at him steadily for a moment before speaking again. “Wo Fat sent me a package while I was locked up.”

Danny takes a deep breath. “You did not just say what I thought you said, Steven. Because if you did that means you didn’t bother telling your team that you’d had contact with the man who framed you for murder,” he ends with a growl. Steve’s wince is vaguely satisfying.

“There were photos, of my parents and the Governor. And of the team, of Mary. Of you and Grace,” Steve explains.

Right, of course. Danny seriously hopes Wo Fat is enjoying his long prison stay spent in near complete isolation.

“If I left, he’d leave you alone,” Steve continues. “Although I didn’t count on you guys actually getting something on him,” he adds with a touch of pride.

“You still should have told us,” Danny admonishes, but his heart isn’t really in it. Wo Fat played on Steve’s weak spot; his ohana. Not content with having murdered most of Steve’s actual family he’d threatened his adopted one.

Danny understands, he doesn’t approve or completely forgive Steve but he understands. And that’s enough for now.

They sit there silently for a few moments until Danny glances at the clock and pulls himself up out of the chair; leaves all his anger behind on the table and claps a hand on Steve’s back.

“Come on,” he squeezes Steve’s shoulder, “I’ve got to go pick Gracie up. You can come with.”

“Danny I don’t-”

“Shut up, she’ll be excited to see you, come on,” he says turning away from Steve and grabbing his keys off the counter. He hears the scrape of chair legs behind him as Steve stands up.

“Yeah? She still remembers me?” he asks.

“She’s not a baby Steve, of course she does,” Danny snorts. “Go and get Jack for me,” he instructs as he grabs a few things to put in a bag for the short drive, for Jack just in case.

When they don’t emerge from the living room after a minute or two he goes in to find Steve staring wide-eyed at Jack.

“It’s not rocket science dumbass, just pick him up,” Danny says from the doorway. Steve glares at him, but tentatively picks Jack up and holds him the same way Danny had earlier. “Well done,” Danny grins. “Come on.”

With Jack safely buckled up in the child seat they are ready to go. Danny lets the car idle for a moment in the driveway. “How long are you staying?”

“I only came to talk to you Danny, I mean I’ve got leave, but I didn’t plan on staying-”

“Shut up, we got a spare room. Of course you’re staying,” Danny snaps. Like he’s letting Steve out of his sight before he has to.

“What about Rachel?”

“Business trip.”

“Oh.”

“Not that I wouldn’t be asking you to stay anyway, but you know, one less thing to deal with right?” he clarifies.

“Right,” Steve nods in agreement.

“So you’re staying?” he asks again.

“Yeah,” Steve replies and Danny can’t help looking across. Steve’s smile still isn’t that big goofy one Danny remembers, but it was a quiet, little, happy one, which makes Danny feel like he might be having a heart attack again. Breathe, he reminds himself, breathe.

“Okay,” he says as he pulls the car out of the driveway. “Okay.”

Grace responds to Danny’s “Look who’s here to see you” by running up with a cry of “Uncle Steve!” and wrapping her arms around his waist. It’s then that the big goofy Steve smile finally makes a comeback.

When he turns that smile back on Danny, Danny feels like he is finally breathing properly for the first time in a long time.


End file.
